Part 38

A man of iron, Mangin, with a breadth of chest in keeping with his chin, who could bear the strain of command which had brought down many generals from sheer physical incapacity. Month after month this chin had stood out against German drives, all the while wanting to be in its natural element of the offensive. His resolute, outright solution of problems by human ratios would fit him into any age or any climate. He was at home leading a punitive expedition or in the complicated business of Verdun. Whether he was using a broadsword or a curtain of fire he proposed to strike his enemy early and hard and keep on striking. In the course of talking with him I spoke of the contention that in some cases in modern war men could be too brave.

"Rarely!" he replied, a single word which had the emphasis of both that jaw and that shrewd, piercing eye.

"What is the best time to go out to the front?" I asked the general.

"Five o'clock in the morning!"

The officer who escorted me did not think anything of getting up at that hour. Mangin's is a five-o'clock-in-the-morning corps.

Shall I describe that town on the banks of the Meuse which has been described many times? Or that citadel built by Vauban, with dynamos and electric light in its underground chambers and passages, its hospitals, shops, stores and barrack room, so safe under its walls and roof of masonry that the Germans presciently did not waste their shells on it but turned them with particular vengeance on the picturesque old houses along the river bank, neglecting the barracks purposely in view of their usefulness to the conquerors when Mecca was theirs. There must be something sacred to a Frenchman in the citadel which held life secure and in the ruins which bore their share of the blows upon this old fortress town in the lap of the hills, looking out toward hills which had been the real defense.

Interest quickened on the way to the Verdun front as you came to the slopes covered with torn and fallen trees, where the Germans laid their far-reaching curtains of fire to catch the French reserves struggling through mud and shell-craters on those February and March days to the relief of the front line. Only when you have known the life of an army in action in winter in such a climate can you appreciate the will that drove men forward to the attack and the will of the defenders against outnumbering guns, having to yield, point by point, with shrewd thrift, small bands of men in exposed places making desperate resistance against torrents of shells.

Verdun was German valor at its best and German gunnery at its mightiest, the effort of Colossus shut in a ring of steel to force a decision; and the high-water mark of German persistence was where you stood on the edge of the area of mounds that shells had heaped and craters that shells had scooped by the concentration of fire on Fort Souville. A few Germans in the charge reached here, but none returned. The survivors entered Verdun, the French will tell you with a shrug, as prisoners. Down the bare slope with its dead grass blotched by craters the eye travels and then up another slope to a crest which you see as a cumulus of shell-tossed earth under an occasional shell-burst. That is Douaumont, whose taking cost the Germans such prolonged and bloody effort and aroused the Kaiser to a florid outburst of laudation of his Brandenburgers who, by its capture, had, as Germany then thought, brought France to her death-gasp.

On that hill German prestige and system reached their zenith; and the answer eight months later was French elan which, in two hours, with the swiftness and instinctive cohesion of democracy drilled and embattled and asking no spur from an autocrat, swept the Germans off the summit. From other charges I could visualize the precise and spirited movement of those blue figures under waves of shell fire in an attack which was the triumphant example of the latest style of offensive against frontal positions. There was no Kaiser to burst into rhetoric to thank General Nivelle, who had his reward in an autographed photograph from Father Joffre; and the men of that charge had theirs in the gratitude of a people.

Fort Vaux, on another crest at the right, was still in German hands, but that, too, was to be regained with the next rush. Yes, it was good to be at Verdun after Douaumont had been retaken, standing where you would have been in range of a German sniper a week before. Turning as on a pivot, you could identify through the glasses all the positions whose names are engraved on the French mind. Not high these circling hills, the keystone of a military arch, but taken together it was clear how, in this as in other wars, they were nature's bastion at the edge of the plain that lay a misty line in the distance.

Either in front or to the rear of Souville toward Verdun the surprising thing was how few soldiers you saw and how little transport within range of German guns; which impressed you with the elastic system of the French, who are there and are not there. Let an attack by the Germans develop and soldiers would spring out of the earth and the valleys echo with the thunder of guns. A thrifty people, the French.

When studying those hills that had seen the greatest German offensive after I had seen the offensive on the Somme, I thought of all that the summer had meant on the Western front, beginning with Douaumont lost and ending with Douaumont regained and the sweep over the conquered Ridge; and I thought of another general, Sir Douglas Haig, who had had to train his legions, begin with bricks and mortar to make a house under shell fire and, day by day, with his confidence in "the spirit that quickeneth" as the great asset, had wrought with patient, far-seeing skill a force in being which had never ceased attacking and drawing in German divisions to hold the line that those German divisions were meant to break.

Von Falkenhayn was gone from power; the Crown Prince who thirsted for war had had his fill and said that war was an "idiocy." It was the sentiment of the German trenches which put von Falkenhayn out; the silent ballots of that most sensitive of all public opinion, casting its votes with the degree of its disposition to stand fire, which no officer can control by mere orders.

With the Verdun offensive over, the German soldiers struggling on the Ridge had a revelation which was translated into a feeling that censorship could not stifle of the failure of the campaign to crush France. They called for the man who had won victories and the Kaiser gave them von Hindenburg, whom fortune favored when he sent armies inspirited by his leadership against amateur soldiers in veteran confidence, while the weather had stopped the Allied offensive in the West.

Imagine Lee's men returning from Gettysburg to be confronted by inexperienced home militia and their cry, "The Yanks have given us a rough time of it, but you fellows get out of the way!" Such was the feeling of that German Army as it went southward; not the army that it was, but quite good enough an army to win against Rumania with the system that had failed at Verdun.

XXXI

AU REVOIR, SOMME!

Sir Douglas Haig--Atmosphere at headquarters something of Oxford and of Scotland--Sir Henry Rawlinson--"Degumming" the inefficient--Back on the Ridge again--The last shell-burst--Good-bye to the mess--The fellow war-correspondents--Bon voyage.

The fifth of the great attacks, which was to break in more of the old first-line fortifications, taking Beaumont-Hamel and other villages, was being delayed by Brother Low Visibility, who had been having his innings in rainy October and early November, when the time came for me to say good-byes and start homeward.

Sir Douglas Haig had been as some invisible commander who was omnipresent in his forceful control of vast forces. His disinclination for reviews or display was in keeping with his nature and his conception of his task. The army had glimpses of him going and coming in his car and observers saw him entering or leaving an army or a corps headquarters, his strong, calm features expressive of confidence and resolution.

There were many instances of his fine sensitiveness, his quick decisions, his Scotch phrases which could strip a situation bare of non-essentials. It was good that a man with his culture and charm could have the qualities of a great commander. In the chateau which was his Somme headquarters where final plans were made, the final word given which put each issue to the test, the atmosphere had something of Oxford and of Scotland and of the British regular army, and everything seemed done by a routine that ran so smoothly that the appearance of routine was concealed.

Here he had said to me early in the offensive that he wanted me to have freedom of observation and to criticise as I chose, and he trusted me not to give military information to the enemy. When I went to take my leave and thank him for his courtesies the army that he had drilled had received the schooling of battle and tasted victory. How great his task had been only a soldier could appreciate, and only history can do justice to the courage that took the Ridge or the part that it had played in the war.

Upstairs in a small room of another chateau the Commander-in-Chief and the Commander of the Fourth of the group of armies under Sir Douglas--who had played polo together in India as subalterns, Sir Henry Rawlinson being still as much of a Guardsman as Sir Douglas was a Scot--had held many conferences. Sir Henry could talk sound soldierly sense about the results gained and look forward, as did the whole army, to next summer when the maximum of skill and power should be attained. In common with Nivelle, both were leaders who had earned their way in battle, which was promoting the efficient and shelving or "degumming," in the army phrase, the inefficient. Every week, every day, I might say, the new army organization had tightened.

With steel helmet on and gas mask over the shoulder for the last time, I had a final promenade up to the Ridge, past the guns and Mouquet Farm, picking my way among the shell-craters and other grisly reminders of the torment that the fighters had endured to a point where I could look out over the fields toward Bapaume. For eight and ten miles the way had been blazed free of the enemy by successive attacks. Five hundred yards ahead "krumps" splashing the soft earth told where the front line was and around me was the desert which such pounding had created, with no one in the immediate neighborhood except some artillery officers hugging a depression and spotting the fall of shells from their guns just short of Bapaume and calling out the results by telephone, over one of the strands of the spider's web of intelligence which they had unrolled from a reel when they came. I joined them for a few minutes in their retreat below the skyline and listened to their remarks about Brother Low Visibility, who soon was to have the world for his own in winter mists, rain and snow, limiting the army's operations by his perversity until spring came.

And so back, as the diarists say, by the grassless and blasted route over which I had come. After I was in the car I heard one of the wicked screams with its unpleasant premonition, which came to an end by whipping out a ball of angry black smoke short of a near-by howitzer, which was the last shell-burst that I saw.

Good-bye, too, to my English comrades in a group at the doorway: to Robinson with his poise, his mellowness, his wisdom, his well-balanced sentences, who had seen the world around from mining camps of the west to Serbian refugee camps; to "our Gibbs," ever sweet-tempered, writing his heart out every night in the human wonder of all he saw in burning sentences that came crowding to his pencil-point which raced on till he was exhausted, though he always revived at dinner to undertake any controversy on behalf of a better future for the whole human race; to blithesome Thomas who will never grow up, making words dance a tune, quoting Horace in order to forget the shells, all himself with his coat off and swinging a peasant's scythe; to Philips the urbane, not saying much but coming to the essential point, our scout and cartographer, who knew all the places on the map between the Somme and the Rhine and heard the call of Pittsburgh; to Russell, that pragmatic, upstanding expert in squadrons and barrages, who saved all our faces as reporters by knowing news when he saw it, arbiter of mess conversations, whose pungent wit had a movable zero--luck to them all! May Robinson have a stately mansion on the Thames where he can study nature at leisure; Gibbs never want for something to write about; Thomas have six crops of hay a year to mow and a garden with a different kind of bird nesting in every tree; Philips a new pipe every day and a private yacht sailing on an ocean of maps; Russell a home by the sea where he can watch the ships come in--when the war is over.

It happened that High Visibility had slightly the upper hand over his gloomy brother the day they bade me bon voyage. My last glimpse of the cathedral showed it clear against the sky; and ahead many miles of rich, familiar landscape of Picardy and Artois were to unfold before I took the cross-channel steamer. I knew that I had felt the epic touch of great events.

THE END